Electrical Power and Energy Systems 38 (2012) 97104

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Electrical Power and Energy Systems

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijepes

Supervised learning approach to online contingency screening and ranking

in power systems
Kusum Verma , K.R. Niazi
Department of Electrical Engineering, Malaviya National Institute of Technology, Jaipur, Rajasthan 302 017, India

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: This paper proposes a supervised learning approach to fast and accurate power system security assess-
Received 16 May 2011 ment and contingency analysis. The severity of the contingency is measured by two scalar performance
Received in revised form 15 December 2011 indices (PIs): Voltage-reactive power performance index, PIVQ and line MVA performance index, PIMVA. In
Accepted 18 December 2011
this paper, Feed-Forward Articial Neural Network (FFNN) is employed that uses pattern recognition
Available online 26 January 2012
methodology for security assessment and contingency analysis. A feature selection technique based on
the correlation coefcient has been employed to identify the inputs for the FFNN. The effectiveness of
Keywords:
the proposed methodology is demonstrated on IEEE 39-bus New England system at different loading con-
Articial neural network
Contingency analysis
ditions corresponding to single line outage. The overall accuracy of the test results for unknown patterns
Performance index highlights the suitability of the approach for online applications at Energy Management Center.
Power system security assessment 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Supervised learning

1. Introduction contingencies in approximate order of severity, based on the value

The study of contingency analysis is an important aspect of
power system security. The major task in power system planning
is to examine the performance of a power system and the need
for new transmission expansion due to load growth or generation
expansion [1,2]. Security assessment provides information to the
system operators about the secure and insecure nature of the
operating states in the event of an unforeseen contingency, so that
proper control/corrective action can be initiated within the safe
time limit. Static security analysis identies violations of the oper-
ational constraints by solving an AC load ow, described by a set of
nonlinear equations for each post-contingency case. Therefore,
contingency analysis plays an important role in real-time power
system security evaluation. Contingency analysis comprises the
simulation of a set of contingencies in which the system behavior
is observed. Each post-contingent scenario is evaluated in order
to detect operational problems and the severity of violations.
A lot of research has been carried out in this area in the last few
years, which consists of the selection of the worst contingency cases
by using ranking methods or screening methods. The network
monitored quantities are rst calculated for all the contingencies
and ranking is done based on the results of the approximate solu-
tions. The majority of methods are based on the evaluation by
means of some Performance Index (PI). Ranking methods rank the
Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: kusum_dangi@yahoo.com (K. Verma), krn152001@yahoo.co.in
(K.R. Niazi).
of a scalar performance index, which is the measure of system
stress expressed in terms of network variables and are directly eval-
uated [4]. Many PI based analytical methods suffer from the prob-
lem of misclassication or/and false alarm. The conventional
methods are found to be unsuitable for on-line applications because
of high computational time requirement. Hence there is a pressing
need to develop fast, reliable and accurate on-line security assess-
ment tools to ensure secure operation of the power system.
Various applications of Articial Intelligence (AI) to security
assessment and contingency analysis indicate that this is a very
promising research eld [132]. A three layer perceptron network
with back propagation learning technique has been used for line
ow and voltage contingency screening [1]. In [2], authors investi-
gated Articial Neural Network (ANN)-based method for on-line
security evaluation of power systems utilizing divergence-based
feature selection algorithm. A hybrid Decision Tree (DT) based
approach for fast voltage contingency screening and ranking for
on-line applications in energy management systems is proposed
in [3]. A Cascade Neural Network (CNN) based approach was
proposed for fast line ow contingency screening and ranking.
The lter module and ranking module are composed of feed-
forward neural network [46]. Transient stability assessment of
power system using Probabilistic Neural Network (PNN) and Least
Squares Support Vector Machine (LS-SVM) was investigated in [7].
The approach proposed by the authors in [810] uses Radial Basis
Function (RBF) network to predict the system severity level for a
given set of contingencies. A three-layer perceptron ANN with back
propagation learning technique was designed for line ow

0142-0615/$ - see front matter 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.ijepes.2011.12.025
98 K. Verma, K.R. Niazi / Electrical Power and Energy Systems 38 (2012) 97104
contingency ranking in [11]. In [12], Model Tree (MT) based ap-
proach has been used for fast voltage contingency ranking, of most
severe contingencies for online applications in energy management
systems. In [13], the application of an Inductive Inference method
to on-line steady state security assessment of a power system
was proposed. For each contingency a number of decision rules in
the form of a Decision Tree (DT) were built off-line from a pre-
classied learning set consisting of operating points of the system.
Hopeld model for power system contingency classication is
proposed in [14].The application of multi-layer perceptron neural
network to dynamic security contingency screening and ranking
has been explored in [1519]. The information on the prevailing
operating condition was used to provide contingency screening
and ranking from a trained neural network. A back propagation
trained multiperceptron for power system contingency screening
and static-security assessment has been used in [2024]. A real
power contingency ranking using counter propagation network is
investigated in [25,26]. Contingency screening for steady-state
security analysis by using Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) and ANN
is employed by authors in [27]. In [28,29] voltage contingency rank-
ing using parallel self-organizing hierarchical neural network is
proposed. Fuzzied multilayer perceptron network is developed
in [30,31] for voltage contingency screening and ranking. Contin-
gency evaluation and monitorization using multilayer perceptron
and radial basis function networks and Kohonens self-organizing
maps is proposed in [32].
Recently, ANNs have shown great promise in power system
engineering due to their ability to synthesize complex mappings
accurately and rapidly. The ANN based methods can learn off-line
from training data and is used for on-line classication of new data
much faster than it would be possible by solving the model analyt-
ically. The choice of the number of hidden layers and hidden neu-
rons are important in deciding the accuracy of neural networks. In
this paper, a model based on supervised learning approach is pro-
posed for fast contingency analysis. The method determines the
appropriate PI to measure the system deviation from the normal
or steady state by identifying the transmission lines that violate
the operational limits. Since power system is dynamic in nature,
the ranking for both PIs is obtained separately to understand the
affect of each for a particular contingent case. The main advantage
of the proposed method over the other Articial-Intelligence (AI)
methods reported in the literature is that the approach used in this
paper determines power system security status, contingency
screening and ranking at the same time with very less computation
time and very high accuracy considering wide range of operating
scenarios using only two neural networks for all the contingencies.
The proposed model consists of two four-layered FFNNs for obtain-
ing PI values and performing contingency screening and ranking
with pre-contingent variables only. The neural networks are
trained with Resilient backpropagation algorithm for inputoutput
mapping. Multilayer perceptrons using a backpropagation algo-
rithm are the standard algorithm for any supervised-learning pat-
tern recognition process [33]. The outputs are PIVQ and the PIMVA
which classies a contingency as secure or insecure. Results of
the contingency analysis by the proposed method are compared
with those obtained by the classical performance index method.
Once the network is trained and evaluated, this method can pro-
vide a fast contingency screening and requires much less calcula-
tions as compared to the traditional method. Results on IEEE-39
bus New England system are presented to illustrate the effective-
ness of the proposed method. The high classication accuracy ob-
tained for such large number of operating conditions indicates that
it can be easily applied to even large systems. The proposed super-
vised learning approach operates in generalized manner and is able
to handle new topologies and operating conditions. The proposed
model for contingency analysis is found to be suitable as a decision
making tool for online applications at the energy management
systems.
2. Contingency analysis
Contingency analysis is performed to assess the effect of speci-
ed contingencies on the system security and to alert the system
operators about the critical contingencies that violate the equip-
ment operating limits and/or drive the system to voltage and angle
instability or excessive frequency deviations. The most common
limit violations include transmission line and/or transformer ther-
mal overloads and inadequate voltage levels at system buses. Gi-
ven this information, a system operator can judge the relative
severity of each contingency and decide if preventive actions
should be initiated to mitigate the potential problems [1].
2.1. Contingency selection
As various probable outages compose a contingency set, some
cases in the contingency set may lead to transmission line over
loads or bus voltage limit violations during power system opera-
tions. Such critical contingencies should be quickly identied for
further detailed evaluation for corrective measures. The process
of identifying these critical contingencies is referred to as contin-
gency Selection. Contingency selection identies the critical contin-
gencies among them and ranks them in order of their severity. Two
popularly used methods for contingency selection are screening
methods and ranking methods. Screening methods are based on
the use of an approximate network solution to identify cases caus-
ing limit violations. The ranking of insecure contingencies in terms
of their severity is known as contingency Ranking [134].
2.2. Voltage-Reactive Performance Index (PIVQ)
Voltage-reactive power performance index evaluates the sever-
ity of a contingency derived from the voltage limit violation of a
bus or node and the reactive power generation limit violation of
the generator at a node. Bus voltage magnitudes play a critical role
in the ow of reactive power. System loading conditions greatly
inuence the voltage magnitudes and reactive powers at different
buses. Therefore, reactive power production of the generating units
can provide a good measure of the severity of abnormal voltages as
long as the generating units remain within their reactive power
limits. PIVQ [1] corresponding to each load pattern and for each sin-
gle line outage indicating voltage deviation from the scheduled
voltage at the load buses and reactive power violations at the gen-
erator buses, consisting of two summing terms, dened by
" #
XNB  Sp M XNG   M
W Vi jV i  V i j WGi Qi
PIVQ 1
i1
M DV Lim
i i1
M Q max
i
Where DV Limi V i  V max
i for V i > V max
i is the V min
i  V i for V i < V min
i ,
Sp
Vi the post-contingent voltage at the ith bus, V i the specied (base
case) voltage magnitude at bus i, V max i the maximum limit of voltage
at ith bus, V min
i the minimum limit of voltage at ith bus, NB the num-
ber of buses in the system, WVi the real non-negative weighting fac-
tor (=1), M(=2n) is the order of the exponent for penalty function.
The rst summation is a function of only the limit violated
buses chosen to quantify system deciency due to out-of limit
bus voltages. The second summation, penalizes any violations of
the reactive power constraints of all the generating units, whereQi
is the reactive power produced at bus i, Q max i the maximum limit
for reactive power production of a generating unit, NG the number
of generating units, WGi is the real non-negative weighting factor
(=1).
 K. Verma, K.R. Niazi / Electrical Power and Energy Systems 38 (2012) 97104
The exponent n decided the classication of the PIs. As ob-
served by many researchers, the higher the value of n, the less is
the chance for misclassication in the ranking. A low value of n
such as 1 or 2 may fail to avoid the masking effect and a very high
value of n may cause the nal rank ordering to become worse due
to increased non-linearity [23]. The determination of the proper
value of n is system specic. The optimum integer value n for this
paper is taken as 4.
2.3. Line MVA Performance Index (PIMVA)
Most of the literature on contingency ranking based on analyt-
ical methods show that the ranking by PI methods are widely ac-
cepted. The severity of the contingency is indicated by scalar
performance indices which measure system stress in terms of load
bus voltage violations or transmission line overloads. Contingen-
cies are dynamic in nature depending upon the loads at various
buses i.e. a critical contingency may be a non-critical one at some
other loading condition. Similarly the ranking of particular contin-
gency may be different at different loading conditions. System
loading conditions greatly inuence the power ow in different
lines, and hence performance of the system. Line MVA Performance
Index (PIMVA) [11] indicating the extent of line overloads is dened
by
NL 
X " post #M
W Li S
i
PIMVA
i1
M Smax
i
where Spost
i is the post-contingent MVA ow of line i, Smax
i the MVA
rating of line i, NL the number of lines in the system, WLi the real
non-negative weighting factor(=1). M(=2n) is the order of the expo-
nent for penalty function.
Masking and misranking effects can be avoided to some extent
by using higher order performance indices and optimal selection of
weights for performance indices. For this study, the value of n is
xed at 4. In order to classify the power system static security sta-
tus in terms of PIs, three different security levels have been consid-
ered for the contingencies as indicated in Table 1; Class I (Most
critical contingencies), Class II (Critical contingencies) and Class
III (Noncritical contingencies). Based on the calculated PIs, the sys-
tem security status and ranking can be determined. Class I contin-
gencies indicates that they are never safe under any operating
condition and requires immediate attention, Class II contingencies
indicates that they are not safe since there is violation of some or
all operating constraints depending upon the operating conditions
and these contingencies require proper preventive control mea-
sures and Class III contingencies indicates that are always safe/se-
cure for any operating condition.
3. Static security assessment
Static Security Assessment (SSA) of a power system addresses
whether, after a disturbance (contingency), the system reaches a
steady state operating condition that does not violate given system
operating constraints. These constraints ensure the power in the
network is properly balanced, the magnitude of all bus voltages
is within acceptable limits, and the thermal limit of each transmis-
sion line is not exceeded. In steady state, the static security is eval-
uated using the load ow equations. The load ow is solved for
various types of disturbances and the results are compared with
the system constraints. Violations, if any, are then identied and
the operating condition is labeled secure or insecure. During power
systems normal operating conditions the following constraints for
generator must be satised:
99
P 9
PGi P D PL >
=
i
P 3
Q Gi Q D Q L >
;
i
where PGi and QGi are the real and reactive powers of generator at
bus i ; PD and QD, are the total real and reactive load demands; PL
and QL, are the real and reactive losses in the transmission network.
Inequality constraints must always be imposed on the system to en-
sure secure operation. All bus voltages must be bounded, all line
currents must not exceed the respective thermal limits, and all gen-
erator power outputs must be limited. These constraints can be ex-
pressed as
9
V min < V j < V max for j 1toNB >
>
>
Sl < Slmax for l 1 to NL =
4
PGi;min < P Gi < PGi;max for i 1 to NG > >
>
;
Q Gi;min < Q Gi < Q Gi;max for i 1 to NG
where Vj is the voltage at bus j ; Sl is the apparent power of line l ;
NB, NL and NG are the number of buses, lines, and generators respec-
tively. Eq. (3) corresponds to power balance requirements (power
ow equations), while Eq. (4) corresponds to system operational
constraints, represented by limits imposed to nodal voltage magni-
tudes and real and reactive power ows at system branches and
transformers. The system operating state is classied as secure if
constraints (3) and (4) are satised for a given operating scenario
2 (base case) and also for post-contingency scenarios. If constraints
(3) and/or (4) are violated for at least one of the post-contingency
scenarios, the system operating state is classied as insecure. Con-
straints (3) and (4), when referred to the post-contingency scenar-
ios, are also known as security constraints [24].
The general optimal power ow solution is simply economic
dispatch problem that can be stated as, minimizing the objective
function,
X
F i PGi 5
i
where Fj is the cost function of the ith generating unit subject to
constraints (3) and (4).
4. Supervised learning approach
Supervised learning methods are concerned with the design and
development of algorithms that allow computers to evolve behav-
iors based on empirical data, such as from sensor data or databases.
A major focus of supervised learning research is to automatically
learn to recognize complex patterns and make intelligent decisions
based on data [33]. The proposed model is based supervised learn-
ing approach uses feedforward neural network for pattern recogni-
tion. A feedforward articial neural network is a type of Multilayer
Perceptron (MLP) model that maps sets of input data onto a set of
appropriate output. Unlike the perceptron, a MLP can solve linearly
inseparable problems. The multi-layered neural network operates
in two modes: Training and testing. In the training mode, a set of
training data is used to adjust the weights of the network intercon-
nections so that the network responds in a specied manner. In the
testing mode, the trained network is evaluated by the test data.
Learning occurs in the perceptron by changing connection weights
after each point of data is processed, based on the amount of error
in the output compared to the expected result. The backpropaga-
tion learning algorithm is the most frequently used method in
training neural network. This paper uses a four-layer neural net-
work which is trained by using the Resilient backpropagation algo-
rithm [34]. It is an adaptive weight learning algorithm, which
100 K. Verma, K.R. Niazi / Electrical Power and Energy Systems 38 (2012) 97104
adapt the weight step based on the local gradient information. In
this algorithm the sign of partial derivative of performance func-
tion with respect to the weight is used only to determine the direc-
tion of weight update. The magnitude of partial derivative has no
effect on the weight update unlike other common adaptive learn-
ing algorithms. This overcomes the problem of slow convergence
due to unforeseeable behavior of the value of partial derivative.
The size of weight update is determined by a separate update va-
lue. Due to its very nature of weight update the Resilient backprop-
agation algorithm converges much faster than the conventional
error back propagation algorithm and is not very sensitive to the
settings of training parameters.
5. Data generation for static security assessment and
contingency analysis
The owchart of the proposed method is presented in Fig. 1. The
steps followed for data generation for security assessment and
contingency analysis is:
(i) A large number of load patterns have been generated by ran-
domly perturbing the real and reactive loads on all the buses
and real and reactive power generation at the generator
buses.
(ii) During simulation, the system load has been changed from
1.0 (base case) per unit to 1.6 per unit of base case in steps
of 0.025. Optimal Power Flow (OPF) for each load case is
solved to obtain the operating state dened by the variables
PG, QG. Here, m = 1.6
(iii) A contingency set consisting of all credible contingencies are
considered. For each operating condition, a contingency is
simulated. N-1 contingency is the most common event in
power systems and therefore, only single-line outages are
considered here with n = 46 (number of transmission lines)
(iv) Single line outages corresponding to each load pattern are
simulated by full AC load ow (Newton Power Flow) and
the violations of operating limits of various components
are checked. Keep the load level constant and simulate each
contingency several times to obtain a wide range of operat-
ing scenarios. Here, z = 10.
(v) The post-contingency state of the system is noted for each
contingency to calculate the performance indices, PIVQ and
PIMVA. The obtained values are normalized between 0.1 and
0.9 for each contingent case.
(vi) The system state, contingency type, and the corresponding
security are noted for every operating point and for all the
contingencies of a credible contingency set.
(vii) The whole data set is suitably divided into training set and
test set for performance evaluation purposes.
6. Proposed methodology
6.1. Feature selection
The performance of any neural network mainly depends upon
the good selection of input features for training. It is essential to
reduce the number of inputs to a neural network and to select
the optimum number of inputs, which are able to clearly dene
the inputoutput mapping. For large-scale power systems, the
number of input variables may be extremely large, making the
training process infeasible. By selecting only the relevant variables
as input features and excluding irrelevant ones, higher perfor-
mance is obtained with lesser computational effort ([2,8,10,23]).
Feature selection is performed to identify those features that
contribute most to the discrimination ability of the neural
network. ANNs can be trained on these selected features and the
rest are discarded. The input variables chosen are usually available
as measurements and may be processed in real-time using the
state estimator results or even raw measurements. So, pre-contin-
gent real and reactive power output of generators and real and
reactive demand at all the load buses of the system are considered
as input features. The performance indices of the system PIVQ and
PIMVA are taken as the output features. An approach based on cor-
relation coefcient has been used to select appropriate training
features for the FFNN. The correlation coefcient [10] between
the ith and the jth variable is calculated using (6) as
Efxi xj g  Efxi gEfxj g
Cij i; j 1; 2; . . . ; n 6
ri rj
The correlation coefcients of all the features are obtained to
get the most important features. All the low ranked features having
correlation coefcient, Cij greater than 0.95 are discarded. The vari-
ables that are less correlated are thus selected as features for
FFNN network as shown in Table2, the number of generators being
10 and the number of buses being 21, where the loads are dis-
patched. Thus, out of 62 features, 11 features are selected for the
training set.
6.2. Data normalization
Normalization of a vector means dividing by a norm of the vec-
tor to make the Euclidean length of the vector equal to one. The in-
put/output training and testing set data is scaled in the range of
0.10.9 for each load pattern. For some line outages, load ow solu-
tion failed to converge at some loading condition. Such line outages
are placed at the top of the ranking list with PI values (>0.8) in
Class I. In this work, each input or output parameter x is normal-
ized as xn before being applied to the neural network according to
0:8  x  xmin
xn 0:1 7
xmax  xmin
where xmax and xmin are the maximum and minimum values of data
parameter x.
6.3. Proposed FFNN model for estimation of performance indices
The ANN model selected for on-line security evaluation is a
four-layer feed forward multi-layer perception network trained
with Resilient back propagation algorithm as shown in Fig. 2.
It consists of an output layer with one neuron specifying the per-
formance indices, PIVQ and PIMVA. The number of inputs to the net-
work is equal to the number of training features, FSf. The number
of hidden layers is one or more. The trained network is tested for
its performance on a test set of unseen patterns. The normalized
values of pre-contingent real and reactive power output of genera-
tors and real and reactive demand at all the load buses are consid-
ered as input features for training of the FFNN. Single line outage
contingencies are considered in this paper for on-line ranking, as
they are most frequent in occurrence. Since for the same contin-
gency, some cases may be critical from PIVQ point of view, but
non-critical if only PIMVA is used to assess security and similarly
for some other cases security margin is found to critical from PIMVA
point of view and non-critical from index PIVQ. Therefore, separate
ranking is obtained for PIVQ and PIMVA employing two FFNNs as
shown in the block diagram of the proposed model in Fig. 2. For each
case, the performance indices are obtained off-line by full AC load
ow calculations. Each input vector [yi] is of the following form:
yi Set of selected features; FSf
PG10 ; Q G1 ; Q G2 ; Q G3 ; Q G4 ; Q G5 ; Q G7 ; Q G8 ; Q G9 ; Q G10 ; Q D14  8
 K. Verma, K.R. Niazi / Electrical Power and Energy Systems 38 (2012) 97104 101

Power System Test Case

(Base Case Data)

Run Optimal Power Flow, Eq.(5)

Set operating state variables PG, QG

Random Load Variation(100% to 160% of Base Case)

p=1 to m

(N-1) Contingency Selection.(q=1to n)

Set count=1

Run Newton Power Flow for each q th contingency

Calculate Performance Indices (PI ) :

PIVQ & PIMVA

Save pattern for qth contingency ( for each pth load case)

No
count=count+1 Is count=z?

Yes

No
q=q+1 Is q = n ?

Yes
No
p=p+1 Is p = m ?

Yes

End

Fig. 1. Data generation for security assessment and contingency analysis.

Table 1 The output vector [yo] of the proposed model determine PIs, as
Performance index classication for PIVQ and PIMVA.

Class/rank I (Most critical) II (Critical) III (Non-critical) yo1  PIVQ from FFNN-1
PI range >0.8 0.80.2 <0.2
9
and; yo2  PIMVA from FFNN-2
102 K. Verma, K.R. Niazi / Electrical Power and Energy Systems 38 (2012) 97104

Table 2 the non-critical (secure) contingencies. PIs are thus ranked from I
Features selected for IEEE 39-bus system. to III with decreasing severity in terms of system security. Thus
Feature selection Initial feature set, FSi Final selected feature set, FSf contingency screening and security assessment are performed at
method the same time.
Correlation PG1:10, QG1:10, PD1:21, PG10, QG1, QG2, QG3, QG4, QG5, QG7,
coefcient QD1:21 (Total: 62) QG8, QG9, QG10, QD14 (Total: 11) 6.4. Training and testing patterns

Off-line power ow calculation results corresponding to each

Once the training of the neural network is successfully accom-
plished, the estimation of PI for unknown load patterns is almost
instantaneous. Neural network classication task (screening) using
pattern recognition is also obtained here as contingencies (PI) may
be classied either as secure or insecure in accordance with Table1
that nally gives the ranking for all the contingencies. The output
determines whether a pattern (contingency) belongs to a particular
Class: I, II, or III. The PI values in the Class I and Class II indicate the
critical (insecure) contingencies and those in the Class III indicate
contingent case are used to construct the training patterns. The
load patterns were generated by randomly changing the load at
each bus and generation at PV buses accordingly. Single line outage
contingencies are considered in this paper for on-line ranking, as
they are the most frequent in occurrence. The PI values will be used
as target values for FFNNs. A total of 11 input features (pre-contin-
gent variables) are sufcient for contingency analysis. Data con-
sists of 8946 patterns for each study that is normalized, shufed
and divided into two groups; one for training and the other for
testing.

yi = FSf = FFNN-1
[PG10,QG1,QG2,QG3,
QG4,QG5,QG7,QG8, [yo1] = PIVQ
QG9,QG10,QD14 ]

Input Hidden Output

layer layer layer

FFNN-2
[yo2] = PIMVA

Input Hidden Output

layer layer layer

Fig. 2. Proposed FFNN architecture for contingency screening and ranking.

Fig. 3. IEEE 39-bus New England test system.

 K. Verma, K.R. Niazi / Electrical Power and Energy Systems 38 (2012) 97104 103

Table 3
Sample results of PI calculations and contingency analysis.

Case (In % of base case) Outage No. Line No. PIVQ Class (PIVQ) PIMVA Class (PIMVA)
NR FFNN-1 NR FFNN-1 NR FFNN-2 NR FFNN-2
142.5 8036 1213 0.2509 0.2352 II II 0.1430 0.1413 I I
135 6780 2034 0.4696 0.4707 II II 0.1485 0.1467 I I
140 7752 2526 0.2517 0.2695 II II 0.3412 0.3194 II II
140 7774 2627 0.1918 0.1725 I I 0.2054 0.2129 II II
150 9311 67 0.9000 0.8996 III III 0.1029 0.1048 I I
140 7756 2526 0.2524 0.2734 II II 0.3402 0.3007 II II
130 5674 89 0.1411 0.1524 I I 0.2390 0.2419 II II
100 113 67 0.1625 0.1613 I I 0.1624 0.1621 I I
132.5 6141 939 0.6836 0.6412 II II 0.3001 0.2952 II II
142.5 8216 2526 0.8270 0.7347 III III 0.4430 0.4034 II II

Class I and Class II (Insecure); Class III (Secure).

Table 4
Table 6
Results of PI classication obtained by proposed FFNN.
Performance Evaluation of Proposed Model.
Number of cases PIVQ PIMVA
FFNN-1 for PIVQ
NR FFNN-1 NR FFNN-2
Training results
Class I 1224 1232 0 0
Total operating scenarios 8946
Class II 750 760 163 162
no. of training samples 7000
Class III 6972 6954 8783 8784
no. of features selected 11
Regression (training data) 0.99794
Regression (validation data) 0.99727
7. Simulation results Regression (testing data) 0.99795
MSE (train) 3.624  104
Total time for training (s) 20.0193
The proposed strategy is tested on the IEEE-39 bus New England
system [35]. The system has 10 generators, 12 transformers, 46 Testing results
No. of testing samples 1946
transmission lines shown in Fig. 3. Bus No. 39 is taken as slack Total time for testing (s) 0.9186
bus. For line contingency screening and ranking, 11,500 patterns MSE (Test) 3.925  104
were generated from 25 system topologies by varying the loads Number of misclassication 36/8946
at all the buses and generation randomly in the range of 100 % Of false alarms 0.258 (18/6972)
% Of misses 0.911(18/1974)
160% of their base case values (in steps of 2.5%). For each system
% Classication accuracy 99.59 (8910/8946)
topology, corresponding to 46 single line outages are simulated FFNN-2 for PIMVA
10 times, 460 (46  10) to obtain different operating conditions
Training results
resulting in total 11,500 (460  25) patterns. Contingency analysis Total operating scenarios 8946
has been performed by utilizing the pre-contingency data and the No. of training samples 7000
line performance indices for each load scenario and each outage at No. of features selected 11
a time. Out of 11,500 patterns, 2554 patterns correspond to the Regression (training data) 0.99625
Regression (validation data) 0.99578
cases where Newton Raphson (NR) failed to converge, and, there- Regression (testing data) 0.99208
fore, these cases have been excluded from the training data. A total MSE (train) 2.482  105
of 8946 patterns have been taken to analyze the performance Total time for training (s) 36.6864
(training and testing) of the proposed model. All the simulations Testing results
are carried out using Matlab 7.7 [36], MatPower 4.0 [37]. No. of testing samples 1946
The test results of the proposed FFNN network for contingency Total time for testing (s) 0.6585
MSE (test) 2.938  105
screening and ranking is shown in Table 3. It is observed that nor-
Number of misclassication 02/8946
malized values of PI obtained by the proposed model are close to % Of false alarms 0.011 (01/8783)
desired values of PI obtained from NR method and the contingency % Of misses 0.613 (01/163)
ranking results of proposed model and the NR method are almost % Classication accuracy 99.99 (8944/8946)
the same. It can be concluded from the table that a separate rank-
ing must be done for performance indices, PIVQ and PIMVA. For sam-
ple result for 132.5% of base case, it is found that operational 939 causes bus voltage limit violation, the reactive power gener-
constraints are violated for outage of line 939 in Fig. 3, resulting ation limit violation and the overloading of the transmission lines
in system insecurity as both the PIs are in insecure classes. Such connected to bus No. 9. The outage of line 2526 in Fig. 3 for both
result is expected since bus No. 39 is a generator and line outage 140% and 142.5% of base case makes the system insecure (critical)
as again all the operational constraints are violated. Similar inter-
Table 5
pretations can be drawn for other line outages on the basis of sys-
FFNN Parameters. tem operational limit violations. The number of cases that belong
to the three classes obtained from the proposed model and their
Number of layers 4 (h1h2h30)
Inputs 11
comparison with NR approach is shown in Table 4. Table 5 shows
Outputs 1 the FFNN parameters taken for the proposed model.
Hidden layers 3 Table 6 gives the performance evaluation of proposed cascade
Hidden neurons 8-8-2(FFNN-1); 11-5-1(FFNN-2) neural network. The results show that the ANNs presented
Momentum factor 0.90
excellent performance, with very few occurrences of false alarms
Learning rate 0.07
or contingency misses. False alarms are dened, as the cases in
104 K. Verma, K.R. Niazi / Electrical Power and Energy Systems 38 (2012) 97104
which a secure case has been classied as insecure and misses are
those cases in which insecure cases has been classied as secure
cases. The proposed approach thus provides fast computation of
performance indices and can analyze unknown load patterns. Thus,
it is possible to use the classications obtained with the ANNs not
only for selecting potentially harmful contingencies but also for
classifying system operating state with respect to static security.
The articial neural networks generalization capability has been
also conrmed for the samples tested. The contingency analysis re-
sults obtained from FFNN for the proposed approach is in close
agreement with NR method.
8. Conclusions
This paper proposes a supervised learning approach of ANNs for
on-line application to power system contingency screening and
ranking. A more faster and efcient learning algorithm has been
used to conrm the suitability of the proposed model for online
applications. The proposed approach has been tested on the IEEE-
39 bus New England system, considering different operating sce-
narios. The contingency analysis results indicates ability of the
methodology to screen all the critical contingencies with respect
to static security and at the same time ability to rank them cor-
rectly according to their severity, except for the cases having mar-
ginal values of PI. The excellent classication accuracy indicates
that the contingency selection may be performed to classify system
operating state with respect to static security. Thus system opera-
tor can determine the set of conditions under which a line outage is
critical along with its severity from the test results. The proposed
network is capable of contingency ranking under uncertain loading
conditions and is capable of performing similarly on even larger
systems and can handle multiple contingency cases as well.
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